Newsletter

April 2003

Academic Freedom or Vocational License?

Ben Singer

In recent months, there has
been rising concern over the use of university classrooms and other facilities
by some instructors to promote their personal political agendas by propagandizing
their students. It’s not just university students who are subjected to
propaganda in the classroom: CNN reported recently that certain Maine
grade school teachers had been creating anxiety among students-some of
them the children of National Guardsmen called up to duty for possible
action in Iraq-by condemning U.S. policy toward Iraq. And a letter by a
10th grade student in The London Free Press on February 27 complains of
teachers using their captive student audiences to present an “unbalanced”
condemnatory picture of U.S. policy toward Iraq. Concern over teacher conduct
was also highlighted recently when South Florida University fired a faculty
member because of his alleged use of the university’s facilities and name
to conduct activities in behalf of Middle East terrorist groups.

The rationalizations for
use of the classroom to conduct propaganda activities are often couched
in terms like “academic” freedom or “freedom of speech,” but never as vocational
license – which may be a more realistic description of such conduct. Vocational
license is the unjustified arrogation of power and privilege by a paid
employee for personal benefit. And what is mendaciously called “academic”
in such cases has nothing to do with scholarship but everything to do with
its antithesis, bias and propaganda.

University teachers using
the classroom as a venue for propaganda may include such material in lectures
and assignments, course outlines and personal web sites that are linked
to the course. Moreover, instructors may cancel scheduled classes, exhorting
students instead to attend meetings that promote the instructors’ politics
in place of classroom instruction for which they are paid. But class time,
facilities and university web sites that students are required to consult
for course information are not the personal property of the instructor.
They are university property.

Students often bitterly resent
enrolling in a course advertised in the calendar as one thing only to find
out that they are being subjected to an onslaught of non academic
personal exhortations and inflammatory propaganda that have a tenuous,
contrived relationship to what was advertised-or none at all. Yet the student,
ever conscious that the instructor conducting the course will be assigning
him or her a grade, feels intimidated and hesitates to appeal to a departmental
chairman or dean. And with good reason, for the chair may be on the same
wavelength and a protector of the teacher or may lack the courage to investigate
the complaint.

School administrators, who
should be aware of grievous violations of academic norms, all too often
prefer to devise ways to ignore them – even in the face of impassioned
complaints by students. This may be because they themselves believe that
academic freedom is a grant of vocational license or perhaps are fearful
they will be subject to protests from noisy campus mobs who themselves
agree with the ideology of the abuser. As well, they may not themselves
understood the limits of “academic” freedom.

All too easily forgotten
is the classic statement on the true limits of academic freedom by the
American Association of University Professors: “Teachers are entitled to
freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be
careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which
has no relation to their subject.” This is clear enough: there is a distinction
between “academic” freedom and vocational license.

I would hope that universities
– perhaps under prod-ding from their public and academic constituencies
– pay more attention to that distinction and stop permitting abuse of what
has been a traditional safeguard of legitimate scholarship. For the real
threat to academic freedom does not come from reasonable expectations by
reasonable people but from those who would, as Judy Genshaft, president
of South Florida University said, “hide behind the shield of academic freedom.”

Ben Singer, Professor
Emeritus of Sociology, is a SAFS member.

Published in the London
Free Press, March 11, 2003.